Esthetics of Loneliness

It was the year in which visual artist Sevilay Maria would share her highly anticipated installation and multimedia project #MYOWNGENDER with the world. But that year was 2020. And so Sevilay Maria did not end up in international museums, but at home in lockdown. Weeks were filled with feelings that moved incessantly between fear, insecurity, frustration and resignation. The urge for creation remained. That is why, through digital photography, Sevilay turned in the spring of 2020 to look her feelings straight in the eye through the lens of her camera. There she found with a new series vulnerability and intimacy – even 1.5 meters away.

With the “Quarantine” series, Sevilay Maria looks at nude photography from a female perspective. She moves away from the sexual to find an almost abstract beauty in the body. With friends and acquaintances as models, she purely portrays the conflicting emotions of a world at a standstill. Images of surrender, struggle, vulnerability, strength, unrest, and silence. With light and movement, she accentuates the shapes of the female body as expressively as softly. And with this series, she simultaneously says goodbye to the great promises of her previous project.